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Praise at Home for Envoy, but Scorn at U.N.

UNITED NATIONS, July 22 — In recent months, as one international crisis followed another, John R. Bolton has fulfilled the role of the United Nations’ most influential ambassador at full strength, firmly articulating the position of the United States government regarding Iran, North Korea and the Middle East.

His performance won over at least one crucial critic, Senator George V. Voinovich, Republican of Ohio. Mr. Voinovich’s opposition a year ago forced Mr. Bolton to take the job as a presidential recess appointment, an arrangement that expires at the end of this Congress in January.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has scheduled a hearing this Thursday on Mr. Bolton’s renomination, and a floor vote could come in September. “My observations are that while Bolton is not perfect, he has demonstrated his ability, especially in recent months, to work with others and follow the president’s lead by working multilaterally,” Mr. Voinovich said in a Washington Post opinion article on Thursday in which he confirmed that he would vote for Mr. Bolton.

He said he was impressed by how Mr. Bolton, whom he had suspected of “go it alone” tendencies, frequently invoked “my instructions” from Washington.

The Bush administration is not popular at the United Nations, where it is often perceived as disdainful of diplomacy, and its policies as heedless of the effects on others and single-minded in the willful assertion of American interests. By extension, then, many diplomats say they see Mr. Bolton as a stand-in for the arrogance of the administration itself.

But diplomats focus particularly on an area with less evidence of instructions from Washington and more of Mr. Bolton’s personal touch, the mission that he has described as his priority: overhauling the institution’s discredited management. Envoys say he has in fact endangered that effort by alienating traditional allies. They say he combatively asserts American leadership, contests procedures at the mannerly, rules-bound United Nations and then shrugs off the organization when it does not follow his lead.

Six ambassadors separately offered similar accounts of an incident in June that they said captured the situation. All were from nations in Europe, the Pacific and Latin America that consider themselves close allies of the United States, and they asked to speak anonymously in commenting on a fellow envoy.

Mr. Bolton that day burst into a packed committee hall, produced a cordless microphone and began to lecture envoys from developing nations about their weakening of a proposal to tighten management of the United Nations, his chief goal.

Gaveled to silence, he threw up his hands and said, “Well, so much for trying something different.”

It was not merely rude, the ambassadors said. One recalled that moments later, his BlackBerry flashed a message from another envoy working on management change. “He just busted us apart,” it read.

Three weeks later, on June 30, the 191-member General Assembly upended Mr. Bolton’s strategy to force change, lifting a six-month budget cap that he engineered without agreeing to significant management improvements. Dumisani Kumalo, the South African ambassador and the leader of the Group of 77, which represents 132 developing nations, said Mr. Bolton’s “putting on budget caps and being very contentious” had increased his group’s resistance.

The envoys will not, of course, have any say about whether Mr. Bolton receives the full appointment to the United Nations. But their concerns over his methods extend to issues that the senators will undoubtedly have to weigh: his ability to build coalitions and reach consensus.

Mr. Bolton, whose knowledge of the United Nations is deep from his past service as assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, said he did not believe his manner was confrontational. “It’s not a question of personal style so much as it is a way of articulating a position that puts American interests in the best light,” he said. “And I think in some cases people are unfamiliar with that, but I don’t think that’s confrontational. I think that’s a matter of clarity.”

In particular, he said, in the June episode, he had been simply trying to provoke honest debate.

“I said to myself, maybe there’s a way to do something a little unusual here,” he said. “I know it didn’t work, but I think that’s part of what we have to do to shake things up here, to try to do something a little different, a little creative, to try to talk back and forth and engage in a colloquy as if we were on the floor of a parliament.”

He has plenty of backers who remain convinced that only that kind of tough presence can alter the institution. Perhaps his strongest and longest standing supporter is Senator Norm Coleman, the Minnesota Republican who is a leading critic of the way the United Nations functions.

“What John offers is what the U.S. needs at the U.N. today,” he said in an interview. “John is the right kind of change agent in a universe that is resistant to change. In order to get reform done, you’re going to have to push, you have to be assertive.”

Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman, said, “He has done an extraordinary job representing the U.S. during what has turned out to be an extraordinary time at the U.N., and Secretary Rice thinks he’s doing a terrific job.”

Photo

John R. Bolton, the American ambassador to the United Nations, has alienated some allies, his peers say.Credit
Seth Wenig/Associated Press

But over the past month, more than 30 ambassadors consulted in the preparation of this article, all of whom share the United States’ goal of changing United Nations management practices, expressed misgivings over Mr. Bolton’s leadership.

Representative Bill Delahunt of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on an international relations subcommittee that focuses on the United Nations, said that in a visit here last month he had encountered “frustration and resentment over the U.S. performance at the U.N.”

And outside experts also expressed concerns.

“I actually agree with Bolton on what has to be done at the U.N., but his confrontational tactics have been very dysfunctional for the U.S. purpose,” said Edward C. Luck, a professor of international affairs at Columbia who has followed the United Nations for three decades. “To be successful at the U.N., you have to build coalitions, and if you take unilateral action the way Bolton has, you’re isolated, and if you’re isolated, you can’t achieve much.”

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William H. Luers, president of the United Nations Association of the United States, an independent support group, said, “There clearly are occasions when you have to put your foot down, but if you put your foot down every day, it unravels any diplomatic assets you have.”

Asked about the allied ambassadors’ broad criticisms, Mr. Bolton said, “What I object to as a matter of tactics is compromising with ourselves before we compromise with our opponents, and by compromising with ourselves, I mean compromising with our friends, too.”

Mr. Bolton came to the United Nations on Aug. 2 last year after a bruising battle in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Democrats on the committee cited accusations that he bullied subordinates, shaped intelligence reports to reflect his policy views and tried to engineer the removal of a C.I.A. official who disagreed with him. They also noted scornful references he had made about the United Nations like his comment that 10 floors of the Secretariat building could be lopped off without being missed.

He immediately stood out from the silken diplomatic crowd with a white shaving-brush mustache, the bouncy walk of a fighter entering the ring and a blunt sense of humor that can veer abruptly from lighthearted to cutting.

In the months after his arrival, ambassadors said that despite his history of putdowns of the United Nations, they were impressed by his work ethic and knowledge of his brief and thought they could collaborate with him.

Now the reaction is different. “My initial feeling was, let’s see if we can work with him, and I have done some things to push for consensus on issues that were not easy for my country,” said an ambassador with close ties to the Bush administration.

“But all he gives us in return is, ‘It doesn’t matter, whatever you do is insufficient,’ ” he said. “He’s lost me as an ally now, and that’s what many other ambassadors who consider themselves friends of the U.S. are saying.”

A European envoy said that Mr. Bolton was a difficult ally for his traditionally pro-American group because he often staked out unilateral hard-line positions in the news media or Congress and then proved unwilling to compromise in the give and take of negotiations.

In the aftermath of a 170-to-4 vote last spring on creating a Human Rights Council, which the United States opposed, Peter Maurer, the ambassador of Switzerland, characterized the American approach as “intransigent and maximalist.”

“All too often,” he said, “high ambitions are cover-ups for less noble aims, and oriented not at improving the United Nations, but at belittling and weakening it.”

Mr. Bolton’s habit of avoiding any favorable mention of the United Nations while seizing many opportunities to disparage it is so well established that Senator Paul S. Sarbanes, a Maryland Democrat, observed to him in a May hearing of the Foreign Relations Committee, “The role of constant scold I’m not sure is the best way to induce change.”

An envoy of a country close to the United States complained that Mr. Bolton often stayed away from meetings, leaving ambassadors in the dark about American positions, then produced 11th-hour amendments and demands for reopening points that had been painfully muscled into consensus.

“We are all like cooks, and the U.S. is sitting on the sidewalk and when we have this platter cooked, the U.S. comes in and says it was the wrong dish, you were cooking chicken and we wanted meat,” said an envoy from a country close to the United States.

On June 30, Mr. Bolton stunned a group of allied ambassadors. As they waited in the office of Jan Eliasson, the president of the General Assembly, to approve a plan to review thousands of outdated and redundant directives, word arrived that Mr. Bolton had cut a side deal to postpone the effort. And he had done so with the three countries viewed as the proposal’s most vocal opponents, Egypt, India and South Africa.

Mr. Bolton explained the incident by saying, “What I was trying to do was sit down with people whose positions diverge the most with the United States and, rather than work through indirection, negotiate directly.”

But an envoy from a country that always votes with the United States said: “That came as very shocking and disappointing to us. We usually work very closely with him, but sometimes, I guess, you get surprised.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Praise at Home for Envoy, but Scorn at U.N. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe